We're approaching the midpoint of the year, a magical moment with equal amounts of time and space in either direction. Creative worlds pivots around such midpoints, providing a balance between progress and potential.

When people ask me what I'm working on these days, I have three projects to tell them about. One builds on the past, one exists in a perpetual present, and one looks to the future. I'm excited about all three.

The perpetual present is represented by More Tomorrow, my daily practice in poetry.

My resolution for 2025 was to do something creative every day. Starting from January 1st, I'm on a 179-day streak with my daily poetry practice and counting. So far, so good.

I didn't choose poems because I'm particularly good at poetry or knowledgeable about the medium. Mainly it was because I saw poems as bite-sized nuggets of creativity that could be published to the world with only a phone, an Internet connection, and a social media account. And while novel writing requires coffee, the day's poetics assignment is flash-writing that can be completed before caffeine even has a chance to kick in.

A poem can be expansive enough to fill 24 volumes, like Homer's Odyssey, or compact enough to fit into a social media post, like William Carlos Williams saying, "AITA for stealing somebody else's breakfast plums?" To which I can only reply, yeah Billy, you are the asshole. No matter how sweet or how cold those plums were, it would have served you right if you'd choked on them!

No longer Xing it up on X-nee-Twitter and avoiding Facebook as much as possible, I've landed at Bluesky, where posts have a 300-character limit. For a More Tomorrow poem, that limit includes the title, hashtags, the poem's number, line returns, and any formatting spaces. When the character count turns red, it's time to stop drafting and start editing. Every word matters in a poem. Every letter sound, every shade of meaning, every juxtaposition, every literary allusion, every beat of rhythm, and all of it has to fit into 300 characters or less. Sometimes, I can even find a way to rhyme.

Unlike William Carlos Williams, who couldn't be bothered when "I stole all the cold delicious plums from your icebox/When Willy C. Williams is around, lock your stuff up like Fort Knox" was right there.

When I first read "This Is Just to Say" in 8th grade English class, I imagined the victim of William Carlos Williams's larceny taking revenge by selling Williams's confession note to a poetry magazine and using the royalties to buy a whole orchard of plum trees. That would have been copyright infringement, another kind of theft, but completely justifiable in this instance, similar to how proceeds from O.J. Simpson's memoir, "If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer," were diverted to his victims' families.

I mean, who steals someone else's breakfast and leaves behind a smug, gloating note about how sweet and cold the plums were? Someone had specifically placed those fruits into an icebox overnight to enjoy at prime sweetness and coldness during the breakfast hour, and when they opened the icebox, all they found was this sad trombone of a note in the bowl where the plums had been. The thief then had the audacity to publish the note as a acclaimed poem, just to twist a knife in the wound! Not even O.J. put that much cruelty into his infamous acts, or if he did, he didn't pause to leave a note at the scene of the crime.

Bob Ross, the painter of happy little trees, told a story that when he started painting, he felt daunted and intimidated by the process to the point of trembling as he approached the easel. With practice, his confidence grew and the trembling went away until at last, there came a time when the easel would be the one to tremble when he approached.

I feel that way about poetry. In January, the task seemed daunting. Some mornings, I trembled a bit when I received the daily prompt from #vss365. A few times, I might have quit, until I remembered the extraordinarily low bar set by William Carlos Williams. Because no matter how badly one of my poems turned out, at least it wouldn't read like the handwritten confession of a psychopath stealing food from the mouth of another human being.

I haven't reached the point where the phone trembles when I pick it up off the nightstand, but the poems have started to flow. I am writing poems I could not have written back in January. Some are silly. Some are embarrassing. A few, I think, are getting good.

Not that I have any idea what's good or not, apparently, since I despise "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams with the intensity of a thousand burning suns, and said so in my 8th grade English class, and went even further, to say how much this poem in particular degraded the book of poetry that contained it, and the syllabus of the class that included that book, and the qualifications of Mr. Dephore for teaching it, and the entire genre of poetry for enduring it, and yet somehow, in the reverse-logical world of poetic criticism where all artists steal and great artists steal food, mine is somehow the minority opinion.

This week, one of my poems did comparatively well on social media, collecting far more likes and comments than any of my previous efforts, and I can't figure out why. It was far from my best work, containing a glaring typo and a metaphor that was badly misaligned with its overall theme. I figured this poem would get buried in the archive never to be seen again, but it resonated with more people than usual, or maybe just with an algorithm that put it in front of more eyeballs than usual, and no telling which or why.

I suspect there's an element of randomness to daily poems, like tossing daily strands of spaghetti against a wall. Some will stick and some won't, even though all the strands and all the throws might seem identical.

Tomorrow is another day closer to the midpoint of the year. Another strand of spaghetti. Another poem. Another a plum in the fridge, if it hasn't been stolen by a poetic burglar like William Carlos Williams, but always there will be More Tomorrow.

More Tomorrow daily poems are archived at https://gfishbone.com/more-tomorrow/